In recent years, the tourism sector has undergone several changes, one of which has been the use of new technologies by customers to find out about the wide variety of offers and organise their trips. This has revolutionised the tourism offer, which has wanted to take advantage of this great opportunity, carrying out numerous purchasing operations to adapt to the technological market or to take advantage of the opportunity that the Internet gives to open up to new geographical markets.
Tech M&A to take advantage of market opportunities.
La China ToursForFun was acquired by the also China Ctrip in January 2014, by $100M.ToursForFun, established in 2006, is an online travel provider that provides online shopping experience for all travel needs. It focuses on overseas travel and holiday packages in North America, Europe, Asia, Australia and New Zealand, and South and Central America. Ctrip is China's leading travel company with a wealth of experience. Founded in 1999, it has been able to incorporate new technologies into its business model, and the purchase of the ToursForFun platform is proof of this.
Last February of this year 2014, EasyToBook.com was acquired by MakeMyTrip.com by $5 M. EasyToBook.com which is based in Amsterdam, offers more than 106,681 hotels in over 10,000 destinations around the world. A site for all those who need to make a hotel booking with the best prices and availability.MakeMyTrip.com, online travel company in India. Provides booking services for flights, hotels, and buses; and holiday packages and travel guides.
Mergers and acquisitions in the tourism sector in Spain
In Spain there have also been a number of operations in the tourism sector. Many of them have been bought by foreign companies such as TouristEye and Fogg.
Spain's TouristEye has been bought by Australian company Lonely Planet in November 2013 and Skyscanner bought the Fogg Hotel Finder.
Tourist Eye is an application for iPhone and Android to share experiences among travellers and, above all, to save costs on data tariffs when leaving the country of origin.
"Tourist Eye had received 600,000 dollars in various financing rounds of Spanish and foreign business angels including 500StartupsGonzalo Ruiz Walter Kobylanski and Plug & Play Ventures" says Diego Gutierrez , an expert in alternative financing of the group. Abra Invest.
The hotel search engine Fogg was founded in 2009 in Barcelona and is run by Carlos González. The website is characterised by offering a hotel meta-search engine that uses NLP (natural language processing) to offer users the best possible results, avoiding them having to use many filters to find what they are looking for.
"Skyscanner had already bought the London platform Zoombu in 2011," says Diego Guiterrez.
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